1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of data storage and, more particularly, to the field of the secure storage and transmission of data.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the banking industry, billions of dollars are lost every year due to the unauthorized access to data and accounts. In the field of credit card transfer, various attempts have been made to prevent or curtail such abuse, including the addition of a signature line to the back of the credit card, and the addition of a hologram to the front of the card. Concerning the former, a clerk handling a credit card transaction should compare the signature on the back of the credit card to the signature on the transaction slip; however, in practice, such comparison is rarely made, and if made, is rarely carefully done. Concerning the latter, while a hologram prevents the easy counterfeit of a credit card, it does nothing to prevent the fraudulent use of a validly issued card that has been misappropriated by one not authorized to use it.
Losses are also generated as a direct result of the unauthorized access to information transmitted over airwaves or by computer networks. No truly reliable system practical enough to be implemented has been developed to pare these huge losses since, by their very nature, a relatively large number of individuals must have access to the information.
Therefore, the need for a system that effectively prevents the unauthorized access to account information as well as to funds contained in personal and commercial accounts has long been recognized, but not adequately satisfied. In addition to those attempts mentioned above, various encryption algorithms have been developed and applied to many forms and applications of data and data storage. The encryption algorithms, however, suffer from high complexity, which leads to increased cost and implementation difficulties.
Two systems addressed to the same problems are shown in Simjian, U.S. Pat. No. 3,569,619, and Leighton et al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,879,747. In Simjian, a system is disclosed for storing an authorized credit card user's image on microfilm along with a code on a credit card, so that a point-of-sale device can read the code, call up the image from an external store, and display the image on a screen for comparison with the card holder. No further security measures are taken to protect the data.
Leighton et al., discloses a personal identification system that incorporates a highly sophisticated RSA-type of encoding in a public key-private key system. The disclosed system may be used to store photographic, medical history, or other data onto a data card, but does not rely on an image-based algorithm for storage of secure information.